As a young literature student in the 1990s, the Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbled across a copy of Love and Silence, a forgotten 1967 novel by a writer named Enayat al-Zayyat who died by suicide ...

Mersal, who was then a graduate student ... As a child, she loved language and songs, often shutting herself in her room to listen to music, plays and narrated movies on the radio.